Soup

Budget adventure of God the civil
servant

God is coming to the big screen in one of the
cheapest films ever made in the history of British cinema, writes Catherine
Milner.

Soup, which will premiere at the London Film
Festival this autumn, has been made on a budget of £500,000 - one sixth
of the cost of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Well-known actors were, according to sources,
persuaded to work for as little as £70 a day. The cast includes Alan
Howard as God and Trevor Eve, who played the philandering MP in The
Politician's Wife, as Lucifer.

In the film, God is presented as the beleaguered
manager of a dingy annexe of a civil service building. He sets out to counter
the forces of science that threaten to overwhelm him and calls on Nietzsche,
Freud, Einstein and even the devil to help him in his battle.

The film was the brainchild of George Tiffin, a video
producer and Anthony Taylor, who has made television commercials.

Sir Sidney Samuelson, chief executive of the British
Film Commission, welcomed the initiative: "The main potential of films like
these is to show those with rather more money what film-makers like this would
be able to do with £5 million, rather than just half a
million."